An installment in John T. Edge’s Points South column, Local Fare. Time at Helen’s raises questions, small and large. Other than great barbecue, and my respect and affection for the woman who owns the restaurant, what calls me to Brownsville?…by
John T. Edge |
Sep, 2018

Notes on the songs from our 20th Southern Music Issue Sampler featuring North Carolina. The profiles, eulogies, and essays herein boast of remarkable achievements of North Carolina’s musicians across eras and genres: from unassailable legends (High Point’s John Coltrane, Tryon’s…by
Oxford American |
Nov, 2018

Sarah Winchester and the legacy of living with guns It’s difficult to understate how the repeating rifle revolutionized killing, of both animals and man, as it brought the world from the single-shot muzzle-loaded rifle to a gun that could hold multiple…by
Sara A. Lewis |
Sep, 2018

A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue. One morning in the summer of 1996, Damian Hart was standing naked on a pier in the Aegean Sea. The sun was bearing down on Mount Athos, one of several craggy peninsulas…by
Nick Tabor |
Sep, 2018

A poem from the Fall 2018 issue. None of this surprises you now, does it? I’m not sure I can know that, I responded to myself. Or I think I did. I should have. A friend told me to embrace my disorientation here, to attend to…by
Curtis Bauer |
Sep, 2018

A Points South essay from the Fall 2018 issue. The dock at Mountain Lake is everything a dock should be—whitewashed clapboard, punctuated by an airy pavilion with a red roof—but if you jumped off it, all you’d hit is earth.…by
Nell Boeschenstein |
Sep, 2018

A Points South story from the Fall 2018 issue In the evenings, after the day’s rain, my grandfather drove through Starke counting cars in the lots of other motels, doing the math and feeling like a winner. For guests visiting…by
Scott Korb |
Sep, 2018

A feature essay from the Fall 2018 issue. Prine radiates a sense of well-being, along with a sort of amused nonchalance toward potential disaster. This is a good thing, because the Coupe, as it turns out, has no passenger-side safety…by
Tom Piazza |
Oct, 2018

“That will be the AC turning off.” In darkness, it becomes apparent how the slightest bodily adjustment can make a wooden floor whimper. The four ceiling fans petered out. A laser grid latticed on a projector screen at the front of the room. I heard the sound of zippers as people around me pulled out their own electromagnetic field meters and ghost boxes. Some people had brought their own ghost-hunting toys.

"These places have seen their share of hardship, as economic downturns and shrinking populations have left them with few traces of their former prosperity. The built environment and its artifacts are reflective of the life and culture found here. Traditions of faith, love of country, and pride in hard work are deeply rooted in these communities."

The photographs in Betty Press’s series Mississippi: The Place I Live showcase the work she’s made in the Southern state. Her images capture, with sensitivity and gravity, the beauty, history, and humanity of the region.

Seems like nothing will bring DanielFuselierdown from the ladder. He’s taken breaks from time to time since 2002, when Miss Antoinette K-Doe invited him to paint the exterior of New Orleans’s Mother-in-Law Lounge, but most weeks he can be found two stories up, a tall, thin, white man in a sun hat and paint-splattered overalls, at work on his Southern Sistine Chapel.

The way I listened to music began to twist on me, becoming less theatrical, more interior, and a time came when I needed to be spoken to more than I needed to speak. And that was when I found Iris DeMent.

Cajun records of this vintage are among the rarest and most sought after among collectors. Let Me Play This For You: Rare Cajun Music, 1929–1930, assembled by Ron Brown and Christopher King (two of the world’s foremost collectors of Cajun 78s) for the Tompkins Square label, is essential for anyone who appreciates French-speaking Louisiana’s old-time songs and tunes.

Kevin Curtis lowers his sunglasses and scans the crowd. He’s just finished performing “Folsom Prison Blues” at the Lamar Lounge in Oxford, Mississippi. The audience applauds, but the mood is strange—genuine enthusiasm, curiosity, an undercurrent of discomfort. During one of the choruses, he swayed with a very supportive, very drunk woman from the front row. For the solo, he strummed a tiny guitar pin stuck on his dress coat lapel. I lift my beer toward him from the second row. He notices, raises an eyebrow, nods. “This is the first show since my”—he pauses, presses the sunglasses back up to his eyes—“incarceration.”

On a summer day in 1949, ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, novelist Donald Windham, painter Buffie Johnson, playwright Tennessee Williams, and writer-provocateur Gore Vidal gathered at Café Nicholson, a bohemian supper club set in the back courtyard of an antique store on New York City’s Upper East Side.